Call For Speakers: Applying and speaking at conferences

Slides for my talk about public speaking. Items covered: choosing a topic and an audience, writing your speaker bio, crafting your content (storytelling, slide design, language & tone), finding and applying to speak at events and conferences, preparing for your talk.

The full written article can be found on my personal website: https://tuttiq.me/call-for-speakers/

Transcript

1. Call For Speakers Applying and speaking at conferences
2. Who's speaking? Tutti Quintella (@tuttiq) From ⇒ ⇒ Software Engineer ⇒ Manager D&I and L&D Manager @ Mercari Director of Women Who Code Tokyo Engaged in representing people and leadership since college (~2009) Public speaker since 2018 (conferences, panels, etc)
3. 01 04 CHOOSING A TOPIC AND AN AUDIENCE APPLYING AND PREPARING 02 03 WRITING YOUR SPEAKER BIO CRAFTING YOUR CONTENT
4. Reject yourself before you even try DON'T Try to please or interest everyone Try to make it perfect or bullet-proof DON'T DON'T
5. Remember everyone has something unique to say DO Set and care for your target audience Practice, rehearse and get feedback DO DO
6. General / conceptual knowledge Sweet spot! Your personal experiences Textbook, Lecture Your diary, Stand-up comedy What should I talk about?
7. Topic Brainstorming What do you care about? What have you done? What do you know that people aren’t talking about? What are you learning? What was the last article/presentation you disagreed with or felt was not good enough? What did you do for the first time recently? What do you wish someone told you a year ago?
8. Narrow your audience Who are the event attendees? Level of experience or knowledge of the topic Previous background Interests and goals Think of a persona
9. Speaker bio Who's talking? Why are you qualified to talk about this topic? Write using the third person Follow the guidelines (if any) Short (1 paragraph) and mid version (2 paragraphs)
10. Crafting your content Storytelling 01 Slide design 02 Language & tone 03
11. 01 04 CHOOSING A TOPIC AND AN AUDIENCE APPLYING AND PREPARING 02 03 WRITING YOUR SPEAKER BIO CRAFTING YOUR CONTENT
12. 01 04 BACKGROUND CONTEXT WHERE TO START RESULTS / CONCLUSION LESSONS LEARNED MOVING FORWARD (OR NOT) 02 03 PROBLEM INTRODUCTION WHAT COMES NEXT POSSIBILITIES SOLUTION ATTEMPS TRIAL & ERROR UNEXPECTED EVENTS
13. Slide design Slides with a lot of small text and low contrast are hard to read and digest the whole information on a glance. The audience has to choose if they will focus on trying to read the slide contents or pay attention to what the speaker is saying, which is never a great experience for your audience. Also, what is the end goal of your slides in the first place? Are you using them as your speaker notes so you can remember your lines (like a script)? Are you using them as an illustrated textbook that you want to share later without your talk attached to it? Ideally, for a live presentation, your slides goal should be purely to illustrate and guide your audience through what you are talking. There are other (better) ways to achieve the other goals. You can use the speaker notes section or a separate document to write your text. You can add hidden/skipped slides with extra text that you will not present, but will include when you share the slide deck later. Or you can go ahead and write a blog article for that ;)
14. Slide design Little & structured text Big font High-contrast Illustrations, photos Design consistency Tips Canva.com Free slides themes Unsplash, Pexels Freepik, Undraw Colorhunt, Coolors Resources
15. Language & tone Inclusiveness Level of fluency (on the language and the topic) Tone: casual, serious, inspiring, honest, funny What feelings do you wanna cause in your audience? Avoid extremes
16. Stop trying to make it perfect Off you go, start applying already!!
17. Where can I find speaking opportunities?
18. Speaker Bio Title Description Talk outline, key takeaways Target audience / topic track Previous speaking experience Common information asked: Applying to events
19. Write a script for each slide (but don't read it at the day) Rehearse (maybe record?) Start at small events or internal meetings Ask for feedback On the day, just relax (accept your first times will suck) Preparing for your talk
20. https://speakher.jp
21. Thank you And hope to see you speaking at some events in the future! :) Tutti Quintella https://tuttiq.me @tuttiq